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Start Date

1-7-2006 12:00 AM

Description

Courier services form an important sector of urban freight traffic; leading to a daily volume of traffic that isproblematic in economic and ecologic respects. New logistic concepts for reducing costs, distances and emissionscould improve this situation by increased application of bicycle couriers and bundling of consignments.In this paper we summarise our previous work on the multi-agent-based simulation of alternative logistic conceptsfor city courier services. We discuss models of different organisation forms as well as the tools appliedto their analysis. Since the logistic strategies analysed so far could not display the expected economic andecologic benefits, a new concept named Fixed Exchange Points is presented that is closely related to actualwork-sharing mechanisms of city couriers. We present a simulation model of this strategy and discuss firstpreliminary results.

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Courier services form an important sector of urban freight traffic; leading to a daily volume of traffic that isproblematic in economic and ecologic respects. New logistic concepts for reducing costs, distances and emissionscould improve this situation by increased application of bicycle couriers and bundling of consignments.In this paper we summarise our previous work on the multi-agent-based simulation of alternative logistic conceptsfor city courier services. We discuss models of different organisation forms as well as the tools appliedto their analysis. Since the logistic strategies analysed so far could not display the expected economic andecologic benefits, a new concept named Fixed Exchange Points is presented that is closely related to actualwork-sharing mechanisms of city couriers. We present a simulation model of this strategy and discuss firstpreliminary results.